Posted on 10/11/2020 9:13:00 AM PDT by logi_cal869
The past few weeks have exposed me to an abnormal level of incompetence displayed by private businesses' employees.
The icing on the cake was when I recently had a flat tire and discovered that my mini-spare was defective, told that the only one - without paying >$150 for a new one - was 45 minutes away at a wrecking yard. I make the drive, only to discover that the spare is BLOWN (they never checked it).
To make matters worse, another employee at the nationwide firm 'helped' me to find one with the same bolt pattern off of a different car. Since I'm a gearhead, mechanic, nerd, technician and engineer at heart (plus former business owner), I was sharp enough to check the bolt pattern before leaving without 'trusting' him or their computer.
WRONG BOLT PATTERN. The idiot couldn't even type in my car stats correctly and/or click the right button in their app. >99 out of 100 would have only found out at the most inopportune time when they needed the spare.
This follows a chain of over a couple dozen events leaving me shaking my head wondering HOW IN THE WORLD these idiots remain employed in a market under which employers pretty much have pick of the crop. It appears to be getting worse, customer service apparently taking a backseat to business priorities as well (why worry about customer service when you've been labeled an 'essential business' by your government? /s). It's like businesses are treating jobs as a sort of welfare. With so many businesses closing their doors, it's almost predictable that it would get worse, but I only noticed it sometime in the past month and it appears to be getting worse.
Is it just me? Not asking to be flamed; it's a serious question, seemingly another one of those 'law of unintended consequences' effects of government (mandates). I've not seen anyone else positing similar experiences here or elsewhere...
Btw, free advice: "IF" your vehicle has a spare tire, compel the tire company rotating, replacing or repairing your tires to remove & CHECK THE SPARE TIRE. My spare tire 'experience' of late cost me over 7 hours of wasted time. Again, free advice.
It’s not just you.
Government suppression of the open competition of the marketplace free from government interference is a big culprit.
Things like tariffs and unconstitutional federal protection of unions tend towards the furtherance of inferior products and a lower standard of living.
Unconstitutional big government is NOT your friend.
A recent example. I bought new tires at a warehouse store. About a week later, I got a low tire pressure indicator. 29 psi on one tire, 30 on the other three. They should be at 35 psi per the placard on the drivers door. How did they loose so much air so quickly? Then I looked up at the sticker on the window. It noted the tires had been filled to 32 psi.
Its not you trust me.Good help is near impossible to find these days.Just look at what you have to choose from tells you all you need to know.
Thank government education. Most of the capable people are already running their own small (or even one person) businesses, often online. Many try to claim it is a wage problem - pay enough and the talent will appear. But it won’t...
The talent, in my opinion, is quietly waging an Atlas Shrugged-style strike against traditional work with larger employers, many of whom richly deserve to be punished in this way. That’s one of the reasons why LinkedIn is now full of drivel posted by Sr. Diversity Coordinators and features very little content about real world problems and their solutions.
We are experiencing the symptoms of full employment. Economists note that full employment means many people who would ordinarily not be employed due to incompetence, drug use, personality disorders, etc. are employed. A month ago I put out the word to all the people I knew, no small number, I would hire anyone over 18 to help clean up the yard and house I am trying to sell. It wasn’t that no one was there to answer the call, it was that everyone said the 18 year-olds were fully employed. Several had two jobs.
I am in a small Florida town. There are help wanted signs in almost every business window. Some of the commercial trucks have signs on them advertising employment.
The economy is not bad here at all.
black tires matter.
I guess not, based on your experience.
I’d gripe to my boss about staff not helping/competent.
He said, Lower your expectations.
At least he knew I was trying.
Trust me we don’t have pick of the crop, especially for wage jobs. I guess most of them get so many handouts they don’t need jobs, and unfortunately the marketplace is pricing out a lot of employees for small businesses. Bigger companies are throwing so much hourly money at the good people available and such that it’s hard for a small business to pay someone $12 or more dollars just to scoop fries! Prevailing temp low wage for decent folks is about $15-17 in my area. Majority of applicants I can attract for what used to be minimum wage jobs are real rejects that in no way would you want them representing your business. So I do without and stretch me and my good employees thin til someone good shows up. So you are correct employee quality is way down!
I know this is not about your tire problem but about hiow it was handled by others, but still, could you must not bought a replacement tire onto the existing wheel?
So right about LinkedIn!
The nature of my job requires me to review bank records as part of my audit of organizations. Lately, I have heard more and more stories from these organizations about mistakes made by bank tellers. (They were warning me about transfers I would see between accounts because they had to fix a deposit that the teller posted to the wrong account.)
I’ve also noticed more servers failing to split the bill into two separate checks despite us telling them when they took our order that we wanted separate checks. And when they do split the checks, they charge the wrong person for wine or an appetizer.
Clerks and stockworkers in stores also seem to be getting more impatient.
I blame the masks. I try to keep in mind what it must be like to have to wear them 8 hours straight when my sinuses clog up after wearing one just for the time it takes to do grocery shopping.
Go to a drive thru at any McDonalds in or near a major city. Then, go to a Chick-fil-A. Which one gives better service?
It’s not just you, and that’s good advice to have them check the spare at the time of rotation.
Try Burger King Drive through here in the south. Granted, it’s on a gas stop along a major highway, but I was informed to pull forward to wait for my order. After several more customers were getting theirs and driving on from the window, I got out and was walking back to the window, when I guess someone saw & realized my order was passed over. All I was getting was a sandwich! Not even a specialty! I’ll never stop there again!
35 psi is maximum pressure. I never go with the maximum except for on a truck if I know I’ll be hauling near the maximum load rating of the tires. Any given tire can also fit many vehicles that weigh different amounts. You don’t need as high a pressure on a 1500lb vehicle as you do a 3000lb vehicle.
I’ve got 10 ply AT/MT tires on our half ton truck. Their max pressure is 80psi but if I put that much pressure in them, it would bounce all over our gravel roads, especially the rear with nothing in the bed. Max load is 3,000lb for each tire. That’s 6,000lbs per axle. The entire truck only weighs 4,400lbs and the rear axle weight is way less than half of that. Maybe 1,700lbs sitting on a pair of tires rated at 6,000lbs.
I run 35 on the back and 43 on the front. I only buy the 10 ply tires because they last longer on the gravel roads. The closest grocery store is 18 miles away with 13 of them being gravel.
Tires do tend to loose a little pressure in the Fall and Winter due to the lower temperatures.
They will blame it on Covid-19. I just filed a claim with a major insurance company for damaged done to a 10’ overhead door on my workshop that someone tried to drive through. They forced me to go through a company that recommends companies to go to qet for estimates for repair. The company was not only incompetent but also a bunch of liars. The four companies they came up with were 40 miles away, 30 miles away, 25 miles away and 10 miles away. Of course I went with the last one. Their quote was $2600 but my deductible is $2300. Cancelled claim and will either repair my self or get quotes from other sources. It took almost a month to get response from insurance company.
I have had your experience generally, but not universally. I doubt I can succinctly say what I want to say about your comment. But I don’t think that employers have any sort of “pick of the crop” choices when it comes to employees.
Unfortunately, when it came to your tire situation the consequences for you were blowing off a day. The consequences for the employee who made the mistake, were “oops, sorry. My bad”.
I just went through something similar. I turned 65 in January of 19. October, November of 18 I am getting calls from insurance agents who want to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance. These were extensive phone calls, the guy I eventually bought from, I spent 45 minutes on the phone asking questions. I eventually settled upon a plan, part G. In all that time spent on the phone, the agent, whom I assume has sold five hundred, or a thousand of these policies, since he stated he had been working in the field for 20 years, never uttered the 20 word admonition “by the way you still have to go to your Social Security office and sign up for Medicare A and B”. As a result, my eligibility for Medicare was delayed by a year-and-a-half. There were no consequences, but I had I gotten injured or badly sick during that time, the consequences could have been massive.
If you and I are carpenters who work together, and have worked together 20 years, as far as I’m concerned, it is never ever wrong for me to say “be careful” when I see you climbing up a ladder. Even if I have seen you climb a ladder 5000 times.
Again, I don’t have a succinct summary of this dynamic. But it exists everywhere. When you buy something, you buy it complete with all its defects. And sometimes those defects can be catastrophic.
I’ve noticed this in the last few years with bank branch managers. This used to be a respectable job held by competent, responsible people. Nowadays, it seems like every branch manager I come across is someone who probably would have been working the overnight shift at a fast food joint 30 years ago.
It’s not just you. Since all the older & experienced men retired from our ACE, you get, “I think so.” That is NOT an okay answer. Not even attempting to ask someone who would know.
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